With its tightly-wound pace, dry as a desert sense of humor, and narrative cunning, it’s hard to believe that Sleep is a debut feature. Written and directed by Jason Yu, the film is a thrilling achievement for the ways in which it takes a theme audiences are familiar with — the idea of a housewife beleaguered by some supernatural evil that directors have jubilantly and sardonically played around with for years — and re-enlivens it with a unique and audacious perspective.
Sleep is confined. Much of the film’s action takes place within the small apartment belonging to a young couple, actor Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and his pregnant wife, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi). Hyun-su develops a mysterious sleep disorder, beginning by talking and walking in his sleep, and escalating to committing violent grotesqueries, which causes Soo-jin to become increasingly more terrified. Worried for the safety of their newborn baby, the couple consult a sleep clinic to see whether they can get a handle on Hyun-su’s nocturnal wanderings. When the clinician hits a dead end, and as Hyun-su’s nocturnal activities become horrific and dangerous, Soo-jin becomes convinced that something supernatural is beleaguering the couple. The young wife, terrified for the wellbeing of her baby (at nighttime, she locks herself and her baby into the bathroom as her husband, asleep, roams about, trying to get to her), turns to occult explanations, bringing in a shaman for help.
With his script, Yu takes a carefully searing, even if at times humorous, look at a young couple and each of their psyches as they deal with a new baby. Sleep’s curious gift is that it takes the dynamic presented in Rosemary’s Baby and more than turns it on its head — it whirls it like a top, wildly and gleefully. Rather than believe her husband is a part of a Sanatically-charged group effort against her, à la Rosemary’s Baby, Yu’s Soo-jin believes her husband himself is the host for this great evil, trying to upturn the life she had planned for her newly-started family.
Yu bestows Soo-jin with the same autonomy that Mia Farrow’s Rosemary has, but gives Soo-jin something Farrow’s character is decidedly without: a savior complex. Yu writes Hyun-su to be befuddled, confused, and naive — when gripped by this peculiar illness, it seems natural that Soo-jin, the more sensical partner (although perceived by others as mentally unstable for believing in the supernatural elements at play), believes that he needs her help, and tries repeatedly to help him defeat the evil that has taken root within him. Soo-jin believes that only she can save her husband, her baby, and herself, only adding to the emotional weight of the plotline and our tragic hero.
Yu deliciously and delightfully plays around with gender dynamics in Sleep, turning familiar themes of the mystical and emotional wife married to the rational husband around, and poignantly postulating the question: what would happen if the film itself believed the wife’s beliefs, regardless of whether they were, to be valid? In Rosemary’s Baby, much of the narrative’s thrill lies in the fact of the twist — for much of the film and up until the very end, many of Rosemary’s suspicions seem in her head, until the point when it is breathlessly proved that she was right all along. Here, Yu begins the film believing, from the onset of Hyun-su’s disorder, in Soo-jin. The effect of this is that when we arrive at the end, there is a delicious ambiguity, and the twist could just as well be that she was wrong as much as it could be that she was right.
Rosemary’s Baby begins with a couple having a uniquely fraught dynamic — John Cassavetes’s Guy is a bit sleazy and a vain-ish actor. In Sleep, Yu begins the film with a couple who have a relatively healthy relationship — Hyun-su is an actor, but he is worried, nervous, and self-critical, while Soo-jin happily works with him to run lines, and bolsters his self-esteem when he gets sacked from a job. The two seem on equal footing, which makes it all the more harrowing when the sweet Hyun-su turns violent against Soo-jin. And this haunting, horrifying heft is how Yu is able to infuse a relatively familiar tale with new meaning, able to take the story to new heights.
In allowing a respectful framing for Soo-jin’s fears, Sleep rejuvenates the terrors contained within one of cinema’s most beloved horror stories, all while having a bunch of fun exploring the unique paranoia and fear of the self and those we love.
